Rajkumar Shukla

Rajkumar Shukla is the peasant who attaches himself to Gandhi with a persistence that borders on the comic and the heroic, following him from place to place until his cause is heard. His stubbornness embodies the grievances of indigo cultivators, and his refusal to be dismissed forces Gandhi toward the rural India he had largely avoided. Without this farmer's doggedness, the Champaran chapter, and much of Gandhi's later turn to the peasantry, would not begin.